The struggle over the presence of critical race theory continues with a new bill proposing to ban the controversial academic concept from K-12 classrooms. State Representative Michelle Udall (R-Mesa) introduced the bill, HB2112, which passed 6-4 in the committee that Udall chairs, the Education Committee, on Tuesday.
State Representative Reginald Bolding (D-Laveen), Daniel Hernandez (D-Tucson), Jennifer Pawlik (D-Chandler), Judy Schwiebert (D-Phoenix) voted against the bill.
The bill would prohibit educators from using public money on instruction that blames or judges based on race, ethnicity, or sex. The bill would also prohibit teaching that one race, ethnic group, or sex is inherently moral or intellectually superior; that an individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive either consciously or unconsciously; that an individual should be discriminated against or treated poorly because of their race, ethnicity, or sex; that individual’s moral character is determined by their race, ethnic group, or sex; that an individual is responsible for actions committed by other members of their same race, ethnic group, or sex; that an individual should feel negative emotions because of their race, ethnicity, or sex; and that academic achievement, meritocracy, or traits like hard work are racist or sexist and created to oppress others.
Violation of the bill’s provisions may result in revocation of the educator’s teaching certificate and the charge of a $5,000 fine. School attorneys would confer with the attorney general or county attorney to determine whether a violation occurred.
Critical race theory (CRT) proposes that the U.S. was inherently and systemically racist from its founding and that racism persists through oppressive systems such as capitalism and Christianity. The theory claims that American meritocracy is a myth.
CRT relies on a concept of hierarchies called intersectionality, which asserts that personal traits such as race, gender, class, sexual orientation, disability, etc. determine one’s oppression and privilege. CRT presents a dichotomy: the inherent evil of “whiteness,” and the inherent goodness of “blackness.” In order to fully accept these perspectives, individuals must assume a “race-conscious” outlook on the world and reject the idea that racism comes from beliefs and actions rooted in the intentional hatred of race.
The ultimate goal of CRT is to overthrow this country and remake it in another image.
In the most informal sense of the word, CRT may qualify as a religion. Credit for popularization of the theory is often awarded to Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar and current law professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. In 1995, Crenshaw authored the book “Critical Race Theory: the key writings that formed the movement” in an effort to explain CRT’s nature and purpose.
“Critical Race Theory is an intellectual movement that is both particular to our postmodern (and conservative) times and part of a long tradition of human resistance and liberation,” wrote Crenshaw.
The concepts that make up CRT may be presented independently or under different names, like: social-emotional learning (SEL), culturally responsive education (CRE), and anti-racism. Crenshaw acknowledged these superficial disparities in her 1995 book, assuring readers that unity exists behind these apparent differences.
“Although [CRT] scholarship differs in object, argument, accent, and emphasis, it is nevertheless unified by two common interests. The first is to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America and, in particular, to examine the relationship between that social structure and professed ideals such as ‘the rule of law’ and ‘equal protection.’ The second is a desire not merely to understand the vexed bond between law and racial power but to change it,” wrote Crenshaw.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
In August, 2019, the New York Times began driving an ill-conceived propaganda campaign called Project 1619, named for the year that slavery first came to America in the Jamestown, Virginia colony.
It is that year, argued the Times, that defines our national character to this day — not the iconic 1776.
With their latest propaganda-Pulitzer as a stamp of credibility, the Times and its willing dupes have been ramming this America-hating 1619 propaganda into K-12 and college curricula. But this time the Leftists are getting some real pushback.
Kudos to parents who are speaking up at K-12 school board meetings against the one-sided Project 1619 and the odious Critical Race Theory in their children’s curricula. And kudos especially to Christopher Rufo, who has led a principled, eloquent resistance to the Left’s racialized Marxist indoctrination initiatives.
Another way to fight back against the Left’s propaganda is with an accurate counter-narrative about the Pilgrims’ experience in Massachusetts. The remainder of this article sketches such a counter-narrative.
If educators want to go back four centuries in search of our “national character,” it is the Year 1623 that they should be featuring. It was in that year that the Pilgrims, starving and dying under socialism, abruptly switched to private property and free markets. In short order, the Pilgrims moved from starvation to prosperity, paid off their debts to their English sponsors, and actually did establish a national character that survives to this day.
It is that new national character based on private property, free markets, and personal responsibility that drew a massive migration to America — not the sad introduction of the fusty 10,000-year-old institution of slavery in 1619.
It is with this thought that I write this article with hope.
Namely —
I hope our American educators and media will develop an explicit, deliberate, and positive Project1623 counter-narrative to the one that the Times has been ramming into our media, schools, and our children’s minds.
If Leftist school boards manage to preserve their beloved Project 1619 narrative, then at a minimum, both narratives should be taught with equal vigor, side-by-side, in our schools. Spirited debates by the students, comparing the two narratives would be a positive step.
Prediction: In the near term, as the Democrat Party slides ever-more-leftward toward desultory socialism, racialized Marxism, and communism, the 1623 narrative will emerge as the more positive and relevant today for We the People.
Brief Summary of The Project 1623 Narrative
In November, 1620, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. They promptly lost half their population to starvation, sickness, and exposure that first winter, and they fared little better the second winter. We were all taught that a Native American named Squanto taught the survivors to fish, plant corn, use fertilizer, and hunt deer. While mostly true, it is surely the lesser half of the story.
What most of us never learned (or glossed over) was that the original contract the Pilgrims brokered with their London sponsors required that everything the Pilgrims produced was to go into a common store, and every member was to be allotted one equal share. Further, all the land they cleared, and all the buildings they constructed, were to belong to the whole community rather than to any individual.
To those with visions of Utopia, this must have sounded like the ideal society. Free of outside evil influences from old England and Europe, private property and greed were to be banished. Everyone was to work hard for the common good. Each was to contribute all that one could and take out only what one needed. In modern terms, it was to be a kind of Bernie Sanders neo-Marxist equity-for-all paradise.
So how did it all work out for the Pilgrims?
Horribly!
In the two winters beginning in 1621 & 1622, a great many died from starvation, pneumonia, or both. Here are excerpts from Governor William Bradford’s own retrospective summary of the community’s experience with what we now variously call collectivism, socialism, or communism:
This community (so far as it was) was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it. … Let none object this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.
In other words, said the Governor, it simply didn’t work, even when their very survival depended on it. Mankind’s inherent nature simply wouldn’t accommodate it, no matter how “ideal” it may have seemed to its proponents.
Simply put, Bradford had discovered that even the most idealistic of peoples have no reason to put in any extra effort without the motivation of personal incentives to do so.
Wisely, in April, 1623, Bradford abruptly abandoned socialism. Instead, he assigned a plot of land to each family, permitting them to keep everything they produced and to market anything they didn’t consume themselves. He actually harnessed all that supposed human ”greed” and put it to work in a free-market system of the type Milton Friedman was to espouse so eloquently in the 20th-century Free to Choose series of books and videos.
So … for the Pilgrims, how did free markets and private property work out for the same people in the same place under the same circumstances?
Boffo!
The Pilgrims soon had more food than they could eat or trade among themselves. They set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Native Americans. They paid off their debts to their London sponsors and soon attracted a great European migration. Their new society still had its problems, but hunger was never again one of them.
As Bradford summarized the new approach:
The women now went willing into the field, and took their little ones with them to plant corn, while before they would allege weakness and inability, and to have compelled them would have been thought great tyranny and oppression. … This [new approach] had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content.
Most importantly for us today, Bradford wrote about the bitter lessons learned from the failure of original socialistic plan:
Let none argue that this is due to human failing rather than to this communistic plan of life in itself …
Note even circa 1630, when he began writing his notes, Bradford used the term “communistic.”
The Pilgrim experience of 1623 stands as the most authentic-ever, real-life, before-and-after comparison of socialism versus private property and free markets.
Bottom Line: Socialism lost. Free markets won.
In modern times, when confronted with the undeniable historical record of socialism’s many failures, the Left usually argues that the “right people” weren’t in charge, and if only they had been, their utopian socialist vision would have succeeded. If Bradford could speak today, he would surely disagree based on the Pilgrims’ real-life experience. It wasn’t human failings that were the problem — the fault was in the communistic plan itself.
So then …
Why isn’t this 1623 lesson featured up front, in neon lights, in American history classes? Why isn’t it the lead story of the Pilgrim experience? Why has the history even been falsified and its most important lesson ignored? Why has the New York Times overlooked it and focused on the 1619 introduction of slavery instead?
Perhaps it’s because the people who write our history textbooks still don’t want to believe it. Perhaps those authors still cling to the hope that some form of their beloved faculty-lounge utopian socialism, collectivism, Marxism, communism, progressivism, or whatever-ism will one day triumph over private property and free markets.
See also this link , which provides an explicit record of three major countries that tried socialism with good intent and suffered horribly for it.
It is now 400 years since the landing at Plymouth Rock. As we cast our votes in 2022 and 2024, all Americans will do well to remember the hard-earned lessons learned by the Pilgrims about socialism versus free markets.
For a long time, school board elections have been one of the easiest to ignore. Maybe it’s because the names on the ballot don’t stand out as much as the candidates for President, Governor, or U.S. Senate. Maybe it’s because people are too busy to research the candidates. Or maybe it’s because voters who don’t have kids—or whose kids are not in public school—don’t see how school board elections can affect them.
But if 2021 has taught us anything, it’s that even the smallest election has consequences. And nowhere has that been more obvious than with the leftist agendas that have taken over Arizona’s school districts this past year.
Americans are barraged with messaging from left-wing politicians and their supportive media informing us we are a fundamentally racist nation, frozen in amber from our slaveholding past, and denying it only proves how racist we are.
But the facts are against these purveyors of resentment. Yes, racism exists–duh-but America is the least racist nation on earth. To label us unregenerate bigots is a slur purposed to divide us by skin color.
First, America in this century has elected to its highest offices two members of racial minorities, if anything aided, not hindered, by their race. Hundreds of other blacks hold elected positions, cabinet posts and positions of influence.
Moreover, this nation of supposed bigots boasts the largest legal immigrant population in the world, with 40 million citizens born outside the country, quadruple the immigrant population in 1965. America is the world’s greatest magnet for immigrants, who seek freedom and fairness.
Black Americans, both native-born and immigrant, have also benefited from the promise of liberty and equality. It is true they have not obtained the financial and social success of some other groups. But know that family breakdown and substandard education have caused more harm than racial animus ever could.
The linchpin of systemic racism allegations is the charge that blacks are regularly gunned down by rogue cops. Again, facts intrude.
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report last year, policeman made 10 million arrests which resulted in 1004 fatalities, 41 unarmed, nine of those black. The same year 89 police officers and about 10,000 black citizens were murdered.
Yet the left continues to attack normal Americans as racists. When usual indices of racism i.e., actual mistreatment of minorities, failed to materialize, the definition of racism was expanded to include believing in the goal of color blindness.
When “racism“ lost its bite due to overuse, “white supremacy” became the all-purpose insult. Whiteness is composed of such subversive notions as “merit,” “family,” “rationality,” “getting the answer right,” and “capitalism.”
This racialized environment was the background in which the recent Virginia election took place. When Terry McAuliffe lost, predictably out came the race card.
“He’s run a racist campaign from start to finish,” it was said of Glenn Youngkin. It was asserted that Republicans decided “tap dancing with white supremacy is their way back to power,” Youngkin made “racial appeals to working class white voters” and “this country simply loves white supremacy.”
These claims not only lacked evidence but were laughable because Youngkin’s successful running mate for lieutenant-governor was Winsome Sears, a black woman of Jamaican descent and his attorney-general was Cuban-American. Sears spoke movingly of her experience as an immigrant, later a Marine and an American living the Dream.
Evidence of Youngkin’s racism was based largely on his opposition to Critical Race Theory in the public schools and his support of parents who were threatened for opposing it. CRT is the thoroughly un-American notion that character is determined by skin color. Whites are inherently racist as is the country they founded, while blacks are incapable of racism by nature.
The racial haters defending CRT first defended it as necessary, then denied it was being taught. By the time of the election, analysts were insisting that CRT “isn’t real” and is “code for white parents don’t like the idea of teaching about race.”
Again, they have a problem with their facts. There is a torrent of published information showing state and local education officials supporting CRT and schools surreptitiously teaching it. Under Governor Terry McAuliffe, the Virginia Department of Education declared that “teachers should embrace Critical Race Theory” in order to “re-engineer attitudes and beliefs systems.”
The relentless lies and deceit about race are a political strategy of the Left, which has determined the future of the Democrat party lies in racially dividing the nation, while posing as the champion of the growing minority groups.
Martin Luther King‘s dream was of a nation where we would judge each other by the “content of our character” not skin color, where race wouldn’t really much matter. Whether his vision or its opposite prevails will determine the future character of America itself.
Devastating. That’s how it felt earlier this week when the Arizona Supreme Court upheld the trial court’s ruling in Arizona School Boards Association v. State of Arizona. This decision strikes down critical reforms contained in a series of Budget Reconciliation Bills passed by lawmakers and signed by Governor Ducey earlier this year.
And it’s a big blow to the people of Arizona.
This past July, Arizona lawmakers took important steps to protect our state from more COVID mandates and government overreach. Among the laws passed were bans on:
A county, city, or town from issuing COVID ordinances that impact private businesses, schools, churches, or other private entities, including mask mandates.
K-12 schools from requiring vaccines with an emergency use authorization for in-person attendance.
The state and any city, town, or county from establishing COVID vaccine passports or requiring COVID vaccines.
Public universities and community colleges from mandating COVID vaccines and vaccine passports.
A city, town, county, school board, or charter school from mandating students and teachers to be vaccinated or wear masks.
But COVID wasn’t the only thing these Budget Reconciliation Bills addressed.
